Part One: Playing Live
I think I said somewhere that I would never do a live show. I'm not sure where or if I said that, but I pretended it was well-documented when I came up for the title of this volume. I began making records when I was fifteen and my first live show was when I was twenty-five (not counting the zillion times I did some sort of drum-related live performance), so I waited a good long while. Most folks go the other way around.
I mostly don't like typical live shows. Usually you're standing in a crowd of idiots peeping over their heads trying to look on stage at some guys jumping around in their own masturbatory world playing music that sounds a lot worse than it sounds on their album. It's like instead of just eating food at a restaurant, you go to the kitchen itself and watch a bunch of chefs hop around the room making stuff, pretending that their ability to cook is in some way linked with their sexual prowess, occasionally throwing food into your mouth.
So when I finally started playing live, I treated the shows different from the usual. But I wasn't trying to be unusual; I was just recognizing more of the true nature of what I was doing and what I was not doing. In its simplest form, I was standing on a stage so people could watch me while I produced music for them. I saw no harm in using a lyric and chord sheet on a music stand. Who says music has to be memorized to be performed? I didn't jump around because jumping around doesn't make the music sound any better. What if orchestras got rid of their sheet music and started leaping off of amplifiers with pyrotechnics all around them?
I also recognized the presence of the crowd. I never at any point should be playing for myself. If I wanted to do that, I'd stay at home and play. So everything I did was for the enjoyment of the crowd. You could argue that all the jumping around and blowing things up on stage is for the enjoyment of the crowd, but to me that's just being lazy--it means that your musical performance isn't interesting enough to hold their attention. It's the difference between playing a great rendition of the "1812 Overture" and playing a crappy rendition and holding up glow sticks at the end.
Shows are basically conversations between me and the audience. Sometimes with actual talking, but mostly with music. The thing that makes crowds great is that they respond audibly. At the risk of sounding like a novelty act, I go for comedy lots just because laughter is the loudest thing, next to applause.
At the end of the show, of course, I'd rather the audience just buy my records since that's where the real work and real music goes. I don't get to hear them react immediately, but they can tell me about it later.
Part Two: Playing These Shows
When Liza brought home an acoustic guitar and I made Rusty Strums The Mnemonic Devices to see if these songs would hold up well enough in these bare-bone versions, that's when I started thinking I might want to do a live solo show. When I finally did, I decided to try to record them all.
Lately David asked me to open for my very first show. The show was fun, but basic: just me strumming and singing. The second show was almost a year later, opening for Thomas Jackson. I decided to go all out with it, and recruited several female vocalists and used many instruments and tried to make the show as varied and interesting as possible. It worked pretty nice. My third show was as the first act in a festival-type thing, and it was okay except that the crowd talked louder than I played. Which was fine, because I ended up getting frustrated, screaming out my songs, and finding a new delivery option that worked pretty well. The last show represented on this album was opening for The Robinsons, who are a great audience just by themselves, and especially with the audience they bring with them. This was also the show that had the best quality recording.
I put all of these shows on CDs for my personal use (I call them "bootlegs"), and eventually thought it would be a good idea to compile a best-of volume each time I had enough material for one. I'd mix everything together so it sounds like one perfect show. The bonus track is here mostly so I can consider the album -- in my head -- a "new release." I don't like it when old things just come out randomly. It's a personal problem.
More volumes will certainly come in the future. You wanted the best, you got the best.
Copyright (c) Jul 2003 by Rusty Spell and Love and Letters Music